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"The first duty of a human being is to assume the right relationship to society—
WHEN I WAS FOUR YEARS OLD, I BEGAN TO WRITE. In the moment when my teacher gave me colored chalk to prove my early talent at the blackboard, I knew that writing would be the occupation that would drive my life. I wrote short stories throughout childhood and, sometimes, poetry. Art therapy? Maybe. It was good for the soul. Teachers would read my work out loud before my classmates (usually anonymously) in high school. I would "freelance" for the high school paper, then go on to serve as reporter, then Entertainment Editor, then managing editor for the Clark College student newspaper, The Independent, in my sophomore year in college. I was married in 1987 and moved to the ultimate news town, Chicago, and it was at Columbia College Chicago that I completed my liberal arts degree in 1990, focusing on journalism, especially magazine editing and publishing. It became an option again in 1994 when, dissatisfied with my working life, I visited Columbia during a reunion and paid a visit to the Creative Writing Department, where I seriously entertained returning to school to get my MFA. Ultimately, I said no, again, because I realized that, at that time, what I really wanted to do was start a family. I tore up my application then and there, and within a year, I became a new mother. Having children changed that trajectory dramatically. I wanted to raise my children without the stress of meeting deadlines, so I decided to close shop as a small press publisher and freelancer. Creative writing emerged as the ideal pursuit; I realized that I really didn't need to wait until I was retired to write novels (something I'd always assumed I would do). I did what most writers do who decide to get serious about their work: I took some classes here and there, spent a lot of time in varying writing groups, attended conferences, and read everything I could. And I wrote. Apparently I am someone who needs constant intellectual challenge, as parenthood and writing weren't enough to keep me engaged. During my second pregnancy, I learned that the oddball writing I was producing for workshop actually had a category: magical realism. I immediately took on the task of learning everything I could about magical realism, but found it a difficult subject to break into. The most efficient way to learn about magical realism as a writer is to go back to college, but I wasn't going to have anything to do with that, not with girl 2 on the way. I turned to the Internet as a workaround to the problem, and after a few months, began to see the structure of a literary magazine emerging from my notes. Margin, a web-based literary anthology with an international staff and contributors, was born 3 months after my second daughter. I finished three: The Chalk Match, a YA novel with magical realism elements; Fiddlehead's Odyssey, my first and successful attempt at National Novel Writing Month; and Leafminers, a literary novel with magical realism elements. Three others remain unfinished, but not forgotten. Manifest Destiny, a mainstream "road trip" novel, is one. Ophelia To The Third will be my biggest and most complicated novel ever, if I can just manage to finish it—a mainstream family saga situated in the fictitious small town from which all of my fiction (short stories, included) springs forth. A third paranormal mystery novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo in the fall of 2008, Lost & Found, is alive and well and the focus of my writer's mind at present. I also started another editorial services business, Writer's Rainbow Literary Services LLC, in October of 2007 as a response to so many requests for my assistance as a critic, coach, instructor, speaker, mentor, and manuscript editor. Not long after that, I was approached with the opportunity to become the conference organizer for the local writing community, Field's End, and I accepted it. After so many gains in 2007 and through mid-2008, the six months that followed turned out to be a dark hole of loss. My father-in-law's cancer diagnosis and subsequent passing prompted me to take a hiatus from a fourth book I had started, a nonfiction guide to writing magical realism. I couldn't focus on my own work or the work of anyone else, for that matter. Reality has a way of stubbornly reasserting itself just as you become comfortable with the way you've arranged your life. I extended my break through the holidays to get back on track with myself and my family. In February 2008, I decided to do something I'd delayed for a couple of years: I enrolled in Eric Maisel's Creativity Coaching program. After a few years of hard work, I hope to earn certification with the International Coaching Federation and expand my services as a mentor and coach for creative writers. It has meant I had to make the hard decision of leaving my volunteer work at Field's End, but the demands of a growing business and my own writing projects on perpetual delay finally warranted that decision. I am now teaching classes again, taking all sorts of new clients, developing new channels inside the business, and looking forward to reconnecting with a short story collection I hope to offer via Kindle in 2010, as well as returning to work on a potential poetry chapbook, revisions on existing book-length manuscripts and a whole new realm of writing that corresponds with my coaching business. I blog as much as I can in between it all... about food and photos and TV and culture and family and science and feminism and creative writing and dreams and all the odd little things that make our world so fascinating. As full as life gets for me these days, wearing several "working hats" even as I raise a pre-teen and teenager, I still remember that day in front of the blackboard with the box of colored chalk as a critical defining moment in my life. It was that moment that brought me to this place in the present: working with words, surrounded by words, living through words, in so many ways and with so many different people. Forty years later, I'm still tracing loops in pink and green, sending dust into the air, and I couldn't be happier. Thanks for traveling through this writer's neighborhood. —Tamara Kaye Sellman PS: The coiled shell motif decorating this page was inspired by the spiral images from Keri Hulme's The Bone People. When I read that amazing novel in 1999, I realized that the spiral is the only structure that makes time a manageable construct for me. Perhaps you can see the spiral in your own creative life; I certainly do now as I look back.
International Writing Coach Interviews Tamara Kaye Sellman at Field's End, April 2009 The Writer magazine, October 2007
TAMARA KAYE SELLMAN |
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